John Burgeson

Published 11:00 pm, Friday, April 12, 2013

That's the cold assessment from a major new report, "In the Path of the Storm," conducted by Environment America Research and Policy Center. The report says much of the country's extreme weather over the past decade has been caused by an increasingly hotter planet.

From wildfires in California to thirsty cattle in Texas to wave-smashed homes in Connecticut, the nation is seeing an epidemic of costly weather disasters that have upended the lives of millions of Americans.

The report states that in 2010, extreme weather events in the United States killed 490 people, and even more died in 2011.

Paradoxically, climate change has resulted in flooding in some places and bone-dry droughts in others.

There's also a counter-intuitive increase in what the report calls "extreme snowstorms," as warmer oceans lead to more evaporation and more atmospheric water vapor.

"Crop failures are already here," said Brenda Ekwurzel, a climate scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, who was familiar with the report. "The drought of last summer was one of the costliest in our nation's history, and we had drought conditions over the largest swath of the United States that we've ever had. It was record-breaking -- off the charts."

David L. Downie, director of environmental studies and associate professor of politics at Fairfield University, said the report is "completely in line" with the thinking in the scientific field.

"It's true that not any one single extreme weather event can be attributed to climate change," he said. "But it's the trend that matters, and there has been an increase of extreme weather events around the world."

Downie, who also read the report, said the data is getting increasingly clear that the warming planet is making life more costly, dangerous and uncomfortable.

"It's not just an increase in the overall temperature of the planet, but it's also an actual change in the weather -- precipitation patterns and storms," he said.

The report paints a picture of weather run amuck, with shrinking snow pack in the Rockies, prolonged and frequent heat waves, and longer forest fire seasons out West.

Meanwhile, the Eastern Seaboard is seeing more hurricanes, and they are more likely to be powerful ones.

"Five of seven climate models in one recent study pointed to an increase in the aggregate power of hurricanes in the Atlantic by the end of the next century, with an average increase in power across all models of 10 percent," the report states.

There are also more extreme rain events. Hurricane Irene dropped torrents of rain on North Carolina, New Jersey and Vermont, sending swollen rivers over their banks and ruining infrastructure.

Tornadoes are visiting more often, too: April 2011 was the most active month on record for tornadoes in the United States since record keeping began. The 753 tornadoes recorded that month were nearly triple the previous April.

Then there's the rise in sea levels caused in part by melting ice caps and glaciers, and by the sheer expansion of the ocean because it's warmer now.

The report states, "A `100-year' coastal flood in New York City could happen twice as often by the middle of this century, and 10 times as often by the end of the century."

Ekwurzel says there's a human side to all of this.

"These disasters are transforming many of our communities," she said. "Climate change can seem boring, but the shift in the mean temperature of the whole Earth will mean that we will see heat waves that we're not prepared for at all."